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Maybe you were thinking about the lake, a summer five years ago, the canoe, water like a mirror
Or the time you sent out for pizza, late fall, and waited by the door
Or perhaps the piano recital where your daughter filled the room with the sound of spring
Or was it the car, the light, a darkness from which awakening revealed only hours of your life…missing?

Or, if not those, you may have been recalling a banana, oatmeal, the blaze of a morning sun through the kitchen window
Or a distant voice in a crowd, that child forever calling
Or an idea that slipped between your synapses never quite touching
Or the spot on your back, just to the right of your twelfth or thirteenth vertebra, an itch beyond reach for years, now gone.

Or you are imagining yourself at a Christmas display, say Strawbridge and Clothier, December 12, 1989, mistaking yourself for the mannequin
Or making peffernüsse with a daughter, your laughter the only sound amidst a cloud of confectioner sugar
Or lounging on a white sand beach in Tobago, steel drums and aloe, manta rays swimming in your dreams.

Or, of course, you could find yourself beyond the garage, walking down the street, turning right, moving forward, the neighbor’s car cruising by, slowly
Or in a race, each foot driving you forward, the pack falling in the distance behind you
Or floating up, endlessly, the earth–that rare device–now a speck in the cold silence.

Or you are here, riding this ship, in a chair, seemingly alone, the wind warm and smooth across your face.